One of the major figures of the French film avant-garde of the 1920s and an early feminist, Germaine Dulac combined narratives of psychological realism with the visual techniques of the French Surrealist movement. In the rarely screened L'Invitation au Voyage, she employs a minimum of plot and maximum of atmosphere to convey her tale of the intense desire generated between a bored young wife and a handsome naval officer who meet in a Paris cabaret.

Working from several of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories (including The Oval Portrait), French avant-garde visionary Jean Epstein crafted what is still considered to be one of the most accomplished film adaptations of the writer's phantasmagoric work. As Roderick Usher paints his wife's portrait, she steadily succumbs to an unknown malady. It is a Pygmalion story in reverse, in which the painting draws away the life of the model. Crafteing the story more from striking visual elements—slow motion, superimposition, mobile compositions—than such conventional dramatic elements as acting and narrative exposition, Epstein created what French archivist and historian Henri Langlois once called "the cinematic equivalent of Debussy."